Conrad and Masculinity

32 Conrad and Masculinity
Conrad had already attempted to represent the desire of a non-
European woman in Almayer’s Folly, with mixed results. The woman
in question in this, Conrad’s first novel, is Nina, whose father is the
Dutch Almayer, and whose mother was captured as a child (by
Lingard) from Sulu pirates. Nina is possessed of a sexual and desiring
look, which is evoked in striking if clichéd terms, and is presented as
dangerous to masculinity:
She drew back her head and fastened her eyes on his in one of those
long looks that are a woman’s most terrible weapon; a look that is
more stirring than the closest touch, and more dangerous than the
thrust of a dagger, because it also whips the soul out of the body,
but leaves the body alive and helpless, to be swayed here and there
by the capricious tempests of passion and desire ... bringing terrible
defeat in the delirious uplifting of accomplished conquest.
(AF, 171)
However, the object of this look is not a degenerate white man who will
be destroyed by it, but a heroic Malay ‘Rajah’ who will become a ‘god’
(172) through the firm binary logic of romance gender stereotypes:
She would be his light and his wisdom; she would be his greatness
and his strength; yet hidden from the eyes of all men she would be,
above all, his only and lasting weakness. A very woman! In the
sublime vanity of her kind she was thinking already of moulding a
god from the clay at her feet. A god for others to worship.
(172)
Robert Hampson, who quotes the description of Nina’s ‘look’, hears in
the novel a misogynistic voice expressing ‘a male fear of “passion and
desire” [in which] sexual feelings are feared as loss of control’, generating
‘a discourse of sexuality that is marked by the woman’s
will-to-power, intimations of male sexual anxiety, and the association
of love with death and decay’. 51 He argues that this discourse, and the
associated imagery of the competing jungle vegetation, show the
influence of Schopenhauer’s belief in woman as the agent of the
‘Will’. However, the woman’s conquest is at best an ambivalent one,
since the paragraph describing Nina’s look ends: ‘It is the look of
woman’s surrender’ (AF, 172). Underlying this apparent contradiction
is a rather conventional idea, that women achieve power indirectly
through their sexual influence over powerful men, though Conrad